If this is meant to placate MAGA, I think the White House is going to be disappointed. I suspect the new push to go back to the moon is to house Musk and Trump (and the other billionaires kowtowing to Trump) while their destruction of the earth gets close to completion. Too bad they couldn't have gone a decade ago.
Oopsie.President Donald Trump took classified documents related to his private business interests from the White House in 2021, according to materials the Justice Department apparently provided to the House Judiciary Committee.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the committee’s top Democrat, suggested in a letter to U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi that the new documents were handed over by mistake in a slapdash effort to discredit the dormant criminal case against Trump.
[...]
Raskin told Bondi the documents sent to the Judiciary Committee this month appeared to be part of a misguided Justice Department effort to feed Jordan damaging information about Smith.
“Apparently blinded by the frenzied search to find any scrap of evidence that could be twisted and distorted to level an attack against Special Counsel Smith,” Raskin wrote, “you have, quite amazingly, missed the fact that some of the documents you provided include damning evidence about your boss’s conduct and may well violate the gag order your DOJ and Donald Trump demanded from Judge Aileen Cannon.”
HuffPo
Yeah, Pam's not going to do any favors for Jamie Raskin. To be continued when Democrats gain control. Or will it be swept under the rug as they've always done?“These new disclosures suggest that Donald Trump stole documents so sensitive that only six people in the entire U.S. government had access to them, that the documents President Trump stole pertained to his business interests, and that Susie Wiles, then the CEO of Donald Trump’s super PAC, witnessed President Trump showing off a classified map to passengers on his private plane,” Raskin said in the letter.
Raskin asked Bondi to tell lawmakers in a classified setting who was on the plane, what the map showed and which of Trump’s various business interests were relevant to the documents. The letter includes an image of an aircraft manifest with a redacted passenger list from a 2022 flight from Florida to New York.
Yes, but would it be out of character for Trump? He's never been working for the interests of the country.If the map related to U.S. military posture in the Middle East and was shown to foreign officials, “that would amount to an unforgivable betrayal of our men and women in uniform who are currently valiantly fighting in President Trump’s disastrous war against Iran,” Raskin said.
People still buying this garbage? Iranian leaders made a deal with Obama, and Trump threw it out.
No, Iran didn't give "us" - OR him - a present. Not in the sense he's implying. Trump is the avatar of destruction - the Trump (tarot) tower, if you will. In the labels I put on posts to help me find something previously posted, I've been labeling him as Destroyer of Worlds. The old shit we have built up needed to be broken down, and by golly, he's doing a fantastic job of it.
When we elected George W Bush the second time, I was kind of shocked, and then I thought, well, we have to see how bad it can get before we wake up and build something better. Obviously, it wasn't bad enough - not enough of us were woke, so to speak (no wonder MAGA hates "woke") - and then Obama came along and smoothed over some of the biggest holes, while still carrying on in essentially the same vein. So we elected ourselves a maggot and gave ourselves a viral disaster, but that still wasn't enough. We elected Joe Biden to try to put ourselves back in the Obama box, and, unsurprisingly, things continued to crumble. Tired of the slow deterioration, I guess, we put Trump back in there to really take a wrecking ball to the world.
What we build next is up to us. I hope we get a new pattern. Stop electing Republicans.
UPDATE 09:07 am: The Destroyer has assistants.
There are going to be incredibly widespread and long disruptions. Buckle up.
Alan Dershowitz is in the Epstein files. And not just for being Epstein's attorney. And not in a benign way.
He's old enough he probably expects he won't ever have to go to trial for it. So, he should be one of the first to be investigated when we finally start holding people to account.Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney Alan Dershowitz made an eyebrow-raising excuse for why he couldn’t have made defamatory social media posts about his client’s victims.
The lawyer, who also represented Donald Trump and O.J. Simpson, told a fact-checker for an unnamed outlet that he did not use a computer, according to newly uncovered documents from the Epstein files dump.
The documents suggest that Dershowitz, a Harvard professor, and Epstein were both the subject of lengthy and in-depth reporting.
[...]
Dershowitz, now 87, was also directly asked if he had had sex with an unnamed Epstein victim immediately after the pedophile financier, which he emphatically denied.
[...]
Dershowitz has faced his own accusations from Epstein accusers. The late Virginia Giuffre Roberts maintained that she was trafficked by Dershowitz between 2000 and 2002. Dershowitz has repeatedly denied her claim.
Daily Beast
I bet he has a smart phone. And an assistant who owns a computer.In 2006, Dershowitz was revealed to have provided prosecutors in Florida with information that was intended to discredit several women and girls who had accused Epstein of sex crimes. He took posts made by some accusers from their MySpace accounts, in which they were seen using drugs and alcohol, and attempted to use those posts to discredit them.
[...]
Dershowitz has previously told CNN that he did not own a computer when confronted with the allegation that he used social media to discredit the victims.
And, while we're on the subject of attorneys covering for Epstein...Dershowitz’s use of MySpace to discredit accusers came two years before then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta, who later became President Trump’s Secretary of Labor in his first term, awarded Epstein what has become known as a “sweetheart deal.”
Epstein pleaded guilty to lesser state-level solicitation of underage prostitution charges to avoid federal sex trafficking charges.
She couldn't bring it to her own attention?Before joining the Trump administration, [AG Pam] Bondi, who represented Trump during his first impeachment proceedings in 2019, served as Florida’s first female attorney general.
The Palm Beach Post asked the question: “Should Bondi have looked into Epstein's crimes between the time of his jail release in 2009 and the filing of the criminal charges in 2019, when many have alleged that he sexually assaulted hundreds more?”
[...]
Authorities in Palm Beach started investigating Epstein in Florida in 2005. A grand jury charged him with one count of solicitation of prostitution in 2006 as accounts of sexual abuse from his island mansion began to come to light.
In 2008, despite an overwhelming amount of evidence, Epstein was given the “deal of the century” that saw him serve 13 months out of an 18-month sentence for only two prostitution-related felonies. He was released in July 2009.
[...]
Bondi would not necessarily have had cause to initiate a new investigation unless someone had specifically brought a case to her attention.
UK Independent
I guess that's a start.The Department of Justice (DOJ) has once again tripped over the basics of litigation in its relentless quest for state voter registration records, blowing a deadline to properly serve Washington’s secretary of state with its lawsuit.
In a filing Monday, Eric Neff, the acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Section, said miscommunication with local U.S. attorneys led to the complaint being sent to the wrong addresses. Neff said he then mistook a separate court order in the case — demanding to know why Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs had not yet been properly served — as an extension of the service deadline.
Neff begged the court to forgive his mistake. “The United States acknowledges that it should have filed a motion for extension of time from this Court and requested additional time to serve Defendant,” Neff wrote. “Counsel apologizes to the Court for not having sought a timely extension.”
Democracy Docket
Surely they DO know. This isn't the first time they've missed a deadline in a case.“We would expect the U.S. Department of Justice to know how to properly file a lawsuit in federal court,” Hobbs’ office told Democracy Docket. “We would also expect them to follow official procedures of serving the complaint prior to reaching out to media outlets, considering the important nature of voter data.”
They know. They lie.The DOJ appeared to make a similar error in its lawsuit against Massachusetts.* Despite this, Neff averred “under penalty of perjury” in a declaration to the Washington district court accompanying Monday’s filing that “[m]y Section has successfully served all other lawsuits of this nature in all other jurisdictions successfully.”
Was there no vetting? Actually, it's possible that since the experts in every agency have been fired, perhaps they simply look at loyalty oaths for new hires.After Attorney General Pam Bondi took office, career DOJ attorneys fled by the hundreds and upwards of 75% left the Civil Rights Division as it shifted its focus from protecting voting rights to attacking them.
Last year, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said she welcomed the exodus of experienced attorneys, and has repeatedly advertised openings at the office on social media posts and urging inexperienced, but ideologically aligned, lawyers to apply.
Neff was one of those new hires. [...] Before the DOJ, Neff was a Los Angeles County prosecutor who brought flawed charges based on a conspiracy theory pushed by election deniers. That mistake ended up costing L.A. taxpayers $5 million in a settlement.
Does that fit under the rubric of "ignorance of the law is no excuse?" Sorry your boss fired everybody who knew, but, too bad.“The United States instituted multiple related actions across the country and is coordinating these actions out of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Voting Section,” [Neff] wrote. “Litigating in multiple jurisdictions presents unique challenges to navigate each District’s local rules and varying service requirements in each state.”
And we can't forget the filings they've made using AI in which nonexistent cases are cited.Election law experts have questioned the strategy behind filing dozens of nearly identical lawsuits, some in jurisdictions with adverse case law.
[...]
So far, the DOJ’s machine gun litigation strategy hasn’t been working. To date, three courts have ruled against the DOJ on the merits; the agency is now appealing all three. Another court in Georgia dismissed the case without prejudice because the DOJ filed in the wrong jurisdiction — they made the same mistake in California, but the judge there decided to rule against the DOJ on the merits.
Those are hardly the only legal errors. The DOJ’s filings have been riddled with typos, miscited statutes, and included undeleted drafting notes. The agency spent months emailing the wrong address in Oklahoma to demand voter rolls, and they sent demand letters to the wrong state officials in Rhode Island and Wisconsin.
So, they win even if they don't know what they're doing?[W]hile the mistake is unlikely to doom the DOJ’s case, it is embarrassing.
And the delays this filing fault has already caused could frustrate the raison d’etre for the DOJ’s demands for state’s unredacted voter rolls — forcing election officials to purge their voter rolls ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
So he's turning to something where he had some success...
From Adam Klasfeld's All Rise News newsletter:
As Nicolás Maduro returns to court this week, multiple Latin American leaders appear to be in federal prosecutors’ sights.
Over in the Southern District of Florida, U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones has an open investigation into the Cuban government’s leadership, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The New York Times recently reported that federal prosecutors in Manhattan and Brooklyn are investigating Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who has been engaged in a protracted feud with Donald Trump. Petro has been one of the most outspoken critics of Trump’s boat strikes in the Caribbean, openly denouncing the targeting of the vessels as “murder.”
[...]
New scholarship based on declassified documents shows how Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr wrote the legal rationale for the operation to “snatch” [Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega in 1990], providing the groundwork for the raid on Maduro — and perhaps, the White House’s next target.
[...]
One of the pillars of the Barr doctrine holds that U.S. presidents have “inherent constitutional authority” to execute arrests abroad “even if those actions contravene customary international law.”
[...]
The dusted off doctrine now meets a second-term Trump emboldened to use the Justice Department as an instrument of his personal interests, political agendas, and score settling.
With Trump openly angling for regime change in Cuba, the prosecutor investigating the country’s leadership is a reliable attack dog for the White House.
You're shocked, I know.Both Bahrain and Washington have blamed an Iranian drone attack for the March 9 blast, which the Gulf kingdom said injured 32 people including children, some seriously. Commenting on the day of the attack, U.S. Central Command said on X that an Iranian drone struck a residential neighbourhood in Bahrain.
[...]
Neither Bahrain or Washington has provided evidence that an Iranian drone was involved in the Mahazza incident.
Reuters
How odd.The use of costly, advanced weaponry to defend against attacks by far cheaper drones has been a defining feature of the war. The incident points to the risks and limitations of this strategy: The blast from the powerful Patriot, whether or not it intercepted a drone, contributed to widespread damage and casualties, while Bahrain’s air defenses were unable to prevent strikes that night on the nearby oil refinery, which declared force majeure hours later.
[...]
In response to questions sent to the White House, a senior U.S. official said the United States was “crushing” Iran’s ability to shoot or produce drones and missiles. “We will continue to address these threats to our country and our allies,” the official said, adding that the U.S. military “never targets civilians.” The official did not answer specific questions about the Patriot attack.
Trump is every blowhard rooster you've ever met. Manipulating the market into movement that enriches him personally is the reward for his bluster and bloviating. He has no sense of shame or embarrassment, so the fact that we call him TACO Trump doesn't really concern him. He just counts his coins and continues.In multiple scenarios, if Donald Trump were to invade and try to occupy Kharg Island for an extended period of time, American casualties would very likely be “considerable,” one of the people familiar with the matter says. Some estimates, the first two sources tell us, are easily in the dozens for an initial phase of occupation, with numbers likely to rise sharply if President Trump wished to hold the island for an extended duration.
Trump has long been fascinated with Kharg Island, which holds the bulk of Iran’s oil exports. During his Art of the Deal book tour in 1988, Trump said he would “go in and take it.”
Harrison Mann, a former US intelligence analyst, has written for Zeteo about why a Kharg Island invasion is a bad idea. He writes further for the Quincy Institute’s Responsible Statecraft blog: “For the troops unlucky enough to receive orders to take Kharg, the operation would land somewhere between a suicide mission and a self-imposed hostage crisis.”
As he explains, it’s not clear what the point of the Kharg mission would be, because securing Iran’s oil infrastructure might not necessarily create much leverage for Trump. “The opportunity to inflict a mass casualty event that could sap limited US public support for the war, or to hold entire battalions as de facto hostages, may well appear more valuable to Tehran than oil revenue,” Mann adds.
Joe Kent, Trump’s former director of counterterrorism, who just resigned over Trump’s Iran war, told the Washington Post that a Kharg invasion “would be a disaster.”
“It would essentially be giving Iran a bunch of hostages on an island that they could barrage with drones and missiles,” he said.
What will it take?Sen. Chris Murphy was dining with progressive activists [indicated] that some lawmakers had been doing informal counts to see whether enough votes existed to remove the New York Democrat from his leadership position, according to people familiar with the mid-February dinner.
[...]
Murphy is among a group of senators and top advisers who have grown increasingly dissatisfied with Schumer’s leadership, according to people familiar with the conversations. That group includes Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, who has been initiating conversations with other senators to gauge frustrations with Schumer, some of the people said. Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota has also been active in discussions about her frustrations with Schumer.
[...]
Murphy said he is frequently asked about Senate leadership, but he doesn’t have a count of who would vote to remove Schumer and doesn’t recall mentioning one. [...] Murphy said. “[Schumer] has the support of the caucus.” He said he still supports Schumer.
WSJ
I wouldn't be surprised if this show of protest around the world is much larger than even the last time, now that the whole world is being affected by Mad King Donald's disastrous war on Iran.
Sure, Jan. Then why this...Three weeks into the war, the Iranian regime is signaling that it believes it is winning and has the power to impose a settlement on Washington that entrenches Tehran’s dominance of Middle East energy resources for decades to come.
[...]
Netanyahu said Thursday that the war would end “a lot faster than people think.” Trump said this week the U.S. would wrap up the conflict in the “near future” even as the Pentagon dispatched thousands of additional Marines to the Middle East.
[...]
Iran has retained the ability to fire dozens of ballistic missiles, and many more drones, every day across the Middle East.
Instead of declining, the rate of fire actually picked up in recent days compared with 10 days ago. Iranian strikes inflicted catastrophic damage this week on key energy installations in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates—while Iran’s own oil exports kept booming.
Shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, the Persian Gulf’s chokepoint, remains only possible with Iranian permission.
[...]
“The Iranians aren’t ready to end the war because they have learned an important lesson: They can, comparatively easily and cheaply, cause a lot of damage and disruption. They now want the whole world to learn that lesson, too,” said Dina Esfandiary, an analyst on Iran and author of a book on Iran’s foreign relations.
[...]
Tehran has pledged that it will agree to a cease-fire only if Washington and the Gulf states pay a steep price.
[...]
Iran is planning to enshrine a “new status” for the Strait of Hormuz to require every passing ship to pay fees to Tehran for the privilege.
[...]
“This hubris is dangerous because they are not smart enough to understand that President Trump will never let them win. They don’t understand how far he’s willing to go,” said Jason Greenblatt, who served as the White House special envoy for the Middle East in the first Trump administration.
[...]
A U.S. effort to secure shipping lanes through the Strait of Hormuz would be “a simple military maneuver” with “so little risk,” Trump said Friday in a Truth Social post blasting European allies for refusing to join the mission.
WSJ
Thereby giving Iran (and Russia) a huge boost in dollars to spend on war.The Trump administration is temporarily lifting longstanding sanctions banning the “sale, delivery, or offloading of crude oil or petroleum products of Iranian origin” for the next month in hopes of curbing the meteoric rise in oil prices.
Independent UK
Any bets?A “General License” issued by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control released late Friday permits the purchase of Iranian oil that has already been loaded onto “any vessel” — including ships that have already been sanctioned — by waiving 10 separate sets of sanctions that have targeted both Russian and Iranian oil.
The sanctions that are being temporarily set aside have been in place for years, with many originating during Trump’s first term.
[...]
By waiving the sanctions, the U.S. will allow Iranian and Russian oil that is currently at sea to be purchased and unloaded without penalty until April 19, at which point the sanctions will resume unless the Treasury extends the waiver.
Not any more.One of the missiles failed in flight, and a U.S. warship fired an SM-3 interceptor at the other, according to two of the people. It couldn't be determined if an interception was made, according to one of the officials.
Iran’s targeting of Diego Garcia, about 2,500 miles from Iran, implies its missiles have a greater range than Tehran has previously acknowledged.Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said last month that Iran has deliberately limited the range of its missiles to around 1,250 miles.
WSJ
